This blog is aimed mainly at advanced students of English as a foreign / second language, although it will hopefully also be of some interest to teachers. I intend it to be a mishmash of lessons, exercises and the occasional opinionated rant about the English language.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Recently I read on a language website about how a student was confused about when to use do after who in questions, as someone had told him we can't use do/does/did after who. I don't know who that 'someone' was, but they had obviously got a bit confused themselves. Yes, there are times when we don't use do/does/did after who (and some other question words), but it is really the exception rather than the rule.

Read about using auxiliary do/does/did in questions, and do a couple of exercises.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

On his blog, Literal Minded, linguist Neal Whitman recently discussed something he had said earlier that day, which was:

Oh crap! I forgot to go the store and buy any club soda.

Not everyone who commented on his blog accepted this as being a natural sentence, and I have a bit of doubt about it myself. But as this sentence throws up a couple of interesting language points, I thought I'd make a lesson from it.

Learn a bit about non-assertive words plus purposeful and with five exercises.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

I recently came across this explanation of determiners while looking at a business English course book - Intelligent Business Advanced:

There are three types of determiner: central determiners, predeterminers and postdeterminers, according to their position relative to each other and to the noun or noun phrase they describe.

I was a bit surprised at this, as I don't think I've ever come across these terms in TEFL materials before. And having written a post comparing determiners and pronouns, I was a bit worried that perhaps I'd missed something. So I decided to investigate.

Currently in testing mode

For teacher bloggers etc

With this generator you can make interactive gapfill exercises for your blog or web page. If you want to make an exercise without the interactivity, you can use just the HTML (without the buttons) and the CSS. You could also use this for generating worksheets, but you'd be better going to my Multi-function gapfill generator

Use the program to automatically generate a gapfill exercise

The program will also generate the HTML and Javascript code you need for this particular exercise and it's answers

Copy the rest of the Javascript and CSS code into your blog post or web page

Note - this is slightly different from the previous version, so please read the instructions

Friday, August 3, 2012

This is intended to be one of several posts where I take a look at conditionals from a rather different angle. Zero Conditional rarely gets more than a couple of lines in course books; I'm going to look at in rather more detail, and hopefully encourage you to think about its function, not simply its form.

Click and Drop - Wherever you see this symbol ?, place the cursor over it for instructions, using your mouse.

Answers - At the bottom of the post you will find a row of answer buttons. Click on the appropriate button and return to the exercise.

Print friendly - Each post is designed to be printable. Exercises usually appear on separate pages, or grouped together on a page. You can make a teacher copy with answers by clicking on 'Show All', then printing. Make sure you 'Clear All' before printing student copies. I strongly recommend doing a Print Preview first. You might want to change your margins and you certainly won't want to print every page.

Update - On newer posts, many of the exercises are individually printable. Just click on the print button, and they will appear in a new, easily printable page.

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About Me

Hi. I'm a common-or-garden TEFL teacher living and working in Poland. My background is British, Scottish to be precise.
I am definitely neither a linguist nor an expert on grammar, simply someone with a healthy interest in my language and its development.